The "30 Great Living American Songwriter" Debacle

The NY TIMES wanted to write an article about hip innovations in pop songcraft, but wanted to create a clickbait list more. The result: a Frankenstein thing that exposes some problems with criticism.

Two weeks ago, The New York Times published a list of “The 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters,” and — as lists tend to do — it kicked up a reaction. Surely that was the point, but the furor over this list was intensified when a group of critics who made the list appeared on Wesley Morris’s podcast, Cannonball, to talk about it.

It is worth unpacking.

Lists Are Not Quality Culture Writing

My friend and fellow music/culture writer Michelle Mercer recently wrote an essay on why she doesn’t participate in creating lists. She explains that these kinds of rankings are not meaningful because they would require “a shared set of criteria that does not exist,” reflect “non-aesthetic factors that have little to do with artistic quality: commercial success, cultural timing, publicity, and the demographics of the voters,” and have a tricky relationship to power.

I do participate in making lists for Popmatters.com — mainly end-of-year lists of the jazz recordings I enjoyed the most and thought were the most artistically successful. That being said, I generally concur with Michelle and respect her stand. I make some lists because publishers like them (which is to say, readers like them), and because I dearly hope that readers understand two things: (1) my “best of” lists are merely my opinion, limited as my opinion always is by what I have been exposed to and educated about and by my subjective aesthetic preferences, formed by the lifetime of who I am, and (2) my better music criticism is in the essays that I write as reviews (or otherwise), where I can dig into history, musical details, and nuance.

The Times, of course, knows that the better criticism is in writing, and they included some artist squibs in their “30 Greatest Living American Songwriters” piece, but they were hardly analysis. They also featured interviews with some artists, which are illuminating journalism but not criticism. Much more than most “best of the year” lists, this one was essentially designed to provoke a reaction.

Which it did.

The Substance of the NYT List Isn’t All That Bad

The list is okay, I guess. There are some great/obligatory choices (such as Dolly Parton, Smokey Robinson, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder), some critical favorites who it would be churlish to argue over (Lucinda Williams, Fiona Apple, Outkast), some recency-bias choices that, still, you understand (Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny), and some artists in country music, traditional pop, hip-hop, and other areas who are there as genre placeholders of a sort.

What makes people nuts about these kinds of lists (and about, say, the annual Oscar nominations) are the deserving folks who get left off — the “snubs.” When I first saw the Times list, I almost lost my mind that it excluded Joni Mitchell. But then I recalled, it is the “30 Greatest Living American” list, and Mitchell is Canadian.

Why only 30? Why only American? Well, every list has a limit. In his first video response to the Times list, YouTube Music Guy Rick Beato made a fairly credible list of maybe 50 other songwriters who could credibly have been included (more on that later). All it really proved was that lists, always too short, are a bad idea, as Michelle Mercer tells us all.

Here’s Rick Beato’s first reaction to the list:

But The Attitude and Truth Behind the NYT List Stinks

The problem with the list emerged after the list came out, as the folks who created it explained themselves. The document in question is this episode of Wesley Morris’s Times podcast, Cannonball.¹ Behold:

There are two notable elements to this episode of explanation, one that has riveted the internet (and, yes, telling), the other more important.

First, there is the brief episode at 42:50, when Caramanica reads a comment from a reader (“James”) who objects to the exclusion of Billy Joel from the list. James wrote:

I went to Berklee College of Music and there was an entire songwriting curriculum based on Billy Joel’s songwriting. It’s literally stupid he’s not on this list. It’s like not having Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen on a list of greatest guitarists.

Caramanica openly scoffs as he reads “Berklee College of Music” and then interrupts, looking at the camera to say “I didn’t,” and he breaks into laughter after reading “It’s literally stupid he’s not on this list.” He flings the paper containing the comment into the air, points at the camera, and replies “It’s not” to the line about Hendrix and Van Halen.

Jon Caramanica, pleased with himself

Caramanica comes off as self-satisfied and smug as he digs in to lecture James on why he is wrong. His apparent pride in not being educated about music is pretty shocking and makes you wonder whether it occurred to the Times that the team assembling its list of “greatest songwriters” should include someone who has the ability to, you know, write or even play a song.

Caramanica’s answer to the reader, however, is instructive. He claims that Billy Joel is narrow and derivative, not an innovator like Hendrix and EVH. “Billy Joel is a very good example of a person who writes one or one-point-five kinds of songs that people before him wrote really well and people after him wrote really well …. Billy exists in pre-existing traditions.” (After this last comment, Morris wrinkles his brow in seeming disagreement.)

Aside from Caramanica’s superior attitude and failure to really cite any evidence about Billy Joel, what he is actually saying is this: my purpose in creating this list was to value innovation and contemporary relevance over the perception of 21st-century unhipness that Billy Joel pretty well personifies. No one during the podcast, of course, asks him whether Taylor Swift writes more than one-point-five kids of songs well or whether those kinds of wonderfully hooky pop songs have not been written many times before.

Which leads us to the real issue with this New York Times exercise.

At the start of the Cannonball video, the team explains how the list was made. The Times reached out about a year ago to hundreds of musicians and music industry folks and asked them for their lists of the greatest living American songwriters. Rather than tally the votes quickly and publish the resulting top 25 or 30, the paper sat on the ballots and then convened its critics to create a different result.

The folks on the podcast, even now, don’t agree on what the assignment really was. Morris says, “I accepted the mission as being helping get what was on these musicians … ballots onto a list of 25 and 30 greatest living American songwriters.” Caramanica interrupts, saying that he disagrees. Critic Joe Coscarelli adds, notably, “Actually, our task was to complicate what came back to us in a straightforward and, dare I say, expected way.”

If you go through the ballots the Times made public and tally things up yourself, you can see that the critics wanted to present a different list entirely. And I get it — any list of “best living American songwriters” is going to be clogged at the top with way too many rock and singer-songwriter types who are on (or beyond) the last legs of great careers and most of them are white guys: James Taylor, Randy Newman, Tom Waits, Jeff Tweedy, Donald Fagen (of Steely Dan), and so on. So the Times critics included Young Thug, for example, because the article they really wanted to write was closer to one examining innovations in and the diverse range of talent in contemporary pop songcraft. But that wasn’t going to sell subscriptions or drive clicks.

We got this Frankenstein list instead.

Scoffing Begets More Scoffing, Of Course

If you watch the bulk of the Cannonball video, you will hear something more interesting, as these critics debate who belonged on the list. Morris rode for Fiona Apple, who made it, but he had to fight for her. Caramanica felt that “if you do not think that [Jay Z] is one of the greatest living American songwriters, then you do not listen to American song.”

They admit that they saw the songwriters in a set of “buckets,” finding representatives of certain styles, and even the impossible Caramanica makes a strong argument that arguing for a relatively unknown songwriter like Romeo Santos is the very reason that he is a music critic. This, of course, is what music critics can do well: illuminate a lesser-known talent and explain why they are worth the time of listeners. But a New York Times feature on Santos is not what editors are looking for.

Instead, there is this list and the resulting ire.

After the Cannonball podcast comes out, musicians cannot help but react to it, particularly the Caramanica/Billy Joel sequence. Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau made the case for Joel in his newsletter, writing that he comes out of the Beatles, and “also loved Ray Charles, and had an ear on jazz — you hear that breadth in his songwriting and production, in tracks like ‘New York State of Mind’ or ‘Zanzibar.’ That’s a good thing. It’s called influence, having roots.”

Here is Mehldau playing “New York State of Mind.”’[

Mehldau also nails a critique of Caramanica’s podcast with Coscarelli, calling it “clubby” and suggesting that critics like Caramanica “Tread lightly, with humility. Do not speak so flippantly about great musicians like Billy Joel. Less is more, Jon. Step back. Go back to the records you really love, that you fell in love with.”

That’s good advice. Caramanica could have responded to the comment from James by saying, Billy Joel is a prolific and popular songwriter, but with only 30 slots to fill, I felt that we should make sure that genres like hip-hop and country and songwriters from the last 20 years were also represented.

Rick Beato weighed in for the second time, mainly because of the Caramanica elements in Cannonball.² Beato, who I find wonderful 97% of the time, can’t help but attack the critics in some ways that seem unfair — as when he chides Morris for using the word “like” in a teenager-ish way. As you can see in the photo here, there is some scoffing and eye-rolling by Beato now.

That said, Beato — without naming the phenomenon or getting into it much — quickly identifies one key issue here. He isolates Caramanica, explaining that his agenda in contributing to the list is to ensure that it isn’t dominated by a particular brand of songwriting.

Songwriting is such a peculiar thing, that has so much baggage — it comes with attachments to certain commnities, certain subgenres, and really engaged fans … who have extremely fixed ideas about what constitutes songcraft: a heroic white man with a guitar, struggling through his emotions, sitting in a room, no collaborators, no contact with the outside world, perhaps alcohol, perhaps drugs, accessing some kind of pure emotional truth, and putting it in a rock, country, or otherwise roots affiliated genre…. As much as I enjoy some of that music, I do not mistake that for the totality of American song; I do not mistake that for the best examples of songcraft.

~ Jon Caramanica

This is the “poptimist” argument, the long history of which you can look up on the internet. It is the reaction against the idea of “rockism” — defined loosely by Caramanica, above — the overvaluation of seemingly “authentic” pop music joined with the dismissal of other music made other ways and by other people. The problem with “rockism” was stated most memorably and cannily by writer Kalefa Sanneh in his New York Times article from 2004, “The Rap Against Rockism.” Sanneh doesn’t attack rock music at all but objects to critics who “reduce[] rock 'n' roll to a caricature” and use that to exclude other forms of pop (soul, disco, and this obviously often means music made by and popular with Black folks) from serious discourse. “Poptimism,” then, isn’t all that new, but it caught some intensification during the “identity politics” of the last decade.

The List, Of Course, Is Less About Songcraft Than About the Politics of Music

Simmering beneath all the scoffing on both sides is this question of how music bumps up against politics. When you listen to Beato’s first list of other songwriters who might have been included in the Times list, yes, it is overwhelmingly male, white, and guitar-centric. Does he turn his nose up a bit at the inclusion of Young Thug and Bad Bunny? He does.³ As always with politics, there is some affront on both sides.

But Beato is mostly right. He doesn’t argue that the list had to include John Fogerty or Jackson Browne. He puts his finger on the fact that the list isn’t really what it claims to be — and it’s not about music as much as it is about some issues in politics and culture.

Which brings me back to my friend Michelle Mercer, who has argued for less list-making and more writing about music. Yes. Listen to the art form, argue about it, fall in love with the artists who move you. Play it, whether you went to Berklee or not.

Open your ears to more, not less.

1. Morris is a writer I adore, dating back to when he was writing for Grantland (2013-15), the late, great “magazine” that was axed by ESPN when it was breaking up with Bill Simmons. He started as a film critic — actually appearing with Roger Ebert in place of Gene Siskel back in 1999. I only like some of his podcast work, but he is a great culture writer. But this is the point: even he approaches music as culture first, not primarily as music.

2. Critic and musician Ted Gioia also weighed in after Beato’s second video came out. He supports Beato’s point of view.

3. I am not here to ride for or run down Young Thug, whose music I don’t know, or Bad Bunny, whose music I really like but can’t really vouch for as innovative or original.